Farzana Doctor | Issue 33
A Therapist, Activist and a Writer Walk into A Self-Help Book
A Therapist, Activist and a Writer Walk into A Self-Help Book; 3 Things I Learned While Writing 52 Weeks to a Sweeter Life
1) Creatives and helper-types have something in common
When I started telling other writers about 52 Weeks to a Sweeter Life for Caregivers, Activists and Helping Professionals, A Workbook of Emotional Hacks, Self-Care Experiments and Other Good Ideas, I heard a lot of I need this! enthusiasm.
I hadn’t expected this reaction and hadn’t included writers in the (already incredibly long) title. Of course, some of them are also caregivers, activists or helping professionals, but many aren’t.
Now I wish I had added “creatives” to the title. While researching the book, I learned about psychologist Elaine Aron, who coined the term Highly Sensitive Person, a category of people who are more attuned to and affected by others’ feelings, as well as stimuli such as noise, smells and light. She believes that HSPs make up about 15–20% of the population and tend to gravitate to the arts and helping professions. I relate to the HSP label. Perhaps most of the writers I know would too? (Visit farzanadoctor.com/52Weeks and look for Week 19’s Deeper Dive for a link to an HSP self-test if you’re curious).
2) Writing my first novel changed my life, but not in the way I expected
When I was thirty-two, I went to see a naturopath for insomnia and frequent colds. I wasn’t convinced he could help me, but my employee benefits covered four sessions, so I figured I’d give it a try. During his assessment, he asked, “do you take a lunch break every day?”
I peered at him. What did a lunch hour have to do with anything? I answered that I usually ate in front of my computer. Most of my colleagues did the same. It was normal.
He told me that my sympathetic nervous system was in overdrive and that it was essential that I learned to slow down. Then he leaned in and said, in what I imagined to be his best guru voice, “You have the power to manifest a different reality.”
I manifested this internal dialogue instead: obviously you don’t know what it’s like to work at a large mental health hospital, manage two addiction programs, facilitate groups, have a caseload of individual clients, and travel around the province teaching 2SLGBTQ cultural competency to other service providers while trying to change the homophobic, transphobic organization from within.
While I liked many aspects of my job, it stressed me out. I didn’t yet have a strategy for managing the trauma I was absorbing from clients. I didn’t know how to say ‘no’, or delegate or ask for help, and the workplace rewarded overwork by piling more on. I had a toxic manager. The bureaucracy, like most conservative hierarchies, was oppressive.
I didn’t make a second appointment. That same day, I stayed late at work to make up for the time “lost” at the naturopath’s. Overtired, I went home, was argumentative with my partner and ate microwave popcorn for dinner.
I didn’t tell Dr. Manifestor (who was right about lunch breaks, by the way) that I was also attempting to write my first novel, which I wrote on weekends, early mornings or while on “vacation.” Many writers with full-time jobs and/or parenting responsibilities have this sort of writing schedule, and I don’t think we talk enough about the strain it can cause. I wasn’t resting enough; even in my time off, I was working (because writing is work).
After another few years of this tedious routine, I quit the job and started a private practice. My biggest conscious motivation for this difficult decision was that I wanted autonomy over my time so I could finally finish Stealing Nasreen. I have so much gratitude to those characters for helping me step off my hamster wheel.
But quitting didn’t give me the quick or immediate relief I’d hoped for. It was during this slow period of building a private practice that I realized I was burned out: I felt sad much of the time, needed to sleep well beyond my alarm. I was angry that my previous job had left me washed out. At the same time I was disoriented without the workplace structure and teams that had organized me for a dozen years.
In hindsight I’d probably experienced milder waves of burnout in my twenties, which I’d pushed back by switching jobs, hoping that “a change was as good as a rest”. Likely the impacts of overwork and vicarious trauma were accumulating in my body, the way a dripping faucet slowly and almost imperceptibly fills a tub.
Gradually, with the support of my friends, I restarted my own therapy, exercised more, tried meditation. Sometimes I managed it consistently, sometimes not so much. I created a writing routine that didn’t involve vacation writing. The burnout lifted.
And…it would return again in my forties, in a different context, for similar personal and structural reasons, but that’s a longer story.
I’ve shared my experience in this book to destigmatize burnout because I’ve learned that each time I share it with a burned out helper or activist it provides relief. Let’s normalize that caregiving, activism and helping work (really, just existing in this world) has an emotional impact, both positive and negative. There’s no shame in suffering burnout or vicarious trauma. Perhaps we can look at these experiences in the way we address physical conditions like carpal tunnel syndrome, through prevention, rest and compassionate treatment.
3) Writing A Self-Help Book Was My Self-Help
This was the first book that felt calming to write. Yes, there was self-doubt and deadlines, but each time I did a round of edits I revisited the book’s reminders about boundaries, resisting internalized capitalism, reaching out to community, dealing with sticky feelings, settling the nervous system, and so on. I have also been actively using the book’s ideas as I’ve witnessed and protested the genocide in Palestine, and I hope they are useful to others engaged in social justice work too.
This was also the first writing project that brought together parts of myself—activist, therapist, and writer—that tend to work more separately. Of course, readers of my novels will recognize the therapist and activist hanging out in the background, influencing my plots and prose. As a therapist, I put the writer part on the shelf (though the activist is always whispering in my ear). It’s felt liberating to deliberately call in all these parts in one book.
This book has also made me understand myself better. I processed and included memoir-ish elements. I shared vulnerable anecdotes, like how I first used self-hypnosis at age eleven, shortly after my mother’s death, or how activism left me with vicarious trauma, or how I began to give myself permission to take lunch breaks. And how, many years later, I finally took that naturopath’s advice and began working towards manifesting a sweeter life for myself.
52 Weeks to a Sweeter Life for Caregivers, Activists and Helping Professionals, A Workbook of Emotional Hacks, Self-Care Experiments and Other Good Ideas will be on bookshelves March 2024 in Canada (September/October for US/UK readers). Pre-order now. And save the date for the Toronto launch: March 21, 7pm at Caversham Books.
Farzana Doctor is a Tkaronto-based author, activist and psychotherapist. She has written four critically acclaimed novels including Stealing Nasreen, Six Metres of Pavement, All Inclusive, and Seven, a poetry collection You Still Look The Same. She is a founding member of WeSpeakOut and the End FGM Canada Network.
52 Weeks to a Sweeter Life for Caregivers, Activists and Helping Professionals, A Workbook of Emotional Hacks, Self-Care Experiments and Other Good Ideas by Farzana Doctor Douglas & McIntyre, 2024
A practical guide to self-care and community care, written for helpers—the caregivers, activists, community leaders, mental health and medical professionals who are the first to help others, but the last to seek help themselves.
As an activist, community organizer and social worker, Farzana Doctor has preached self-care to hundreds of people struggling with burnout and exhaustion. But for years she couldn’t manage to take her own advice.
Many other helpers she knew were the same: they knew the signs of burnout, and they understood the science of self-care. Maybe they’d taken workshops on vicarious trauma; maybe they’d even taught them. But still they struggled to escape the cycle of overwork, overwhelm and recovery. 52 Weeks to a Sweeter Life is a workbook that speaks directly to these people—and anyone who struggles to pause, set boundaries and centre their own needs.
The workbook contains fifty-two lessons, one for each week of the year. Each week, readers will find a simple new idea and an experiment for trying it out, with deeper dives into the material provided, but every level of participation celebrated. Throughout, Doctor embraces both community care and self-care at the same time, showing readers the overlap between the two.
Beautifully written, direct and insightful, this workbook is a gentle and practical guide to a more balanced life, written for those who need it most.
Support Send My Love to Anyone
Support Send My Love to Anyone by signing up for a monthly or yearly subscription, liking this post, or sharing it!
Big heartfelt thanks to all of the subscribers and contributors who make this project possible!
Connect
Bluesky | Instagram | Archive | Contributors | Subscribe | About SMLTA